At last Saturday’s Klik of the Month, I started making a game about interior decorating. It ended up being too complex to finish in two hours, so in the last half hour I worked on something else in Unity. Then yesterday, at the regular Cambridge meetup I decided to polish it up a little – I’ve expanded the level, added some background music and given it a name:

31 Comments so far

Good to see this polished up a bit. Glad you kept the red atmosphere and red html background color. It adds so much tension for me to not be able to see the ground. Like exploring inside a gas giant thick with atmosphere. So much more horrifying to slip and fall into the clouds.

Managed to make it all the way to the bottom of your structure. Not sure if there was something else but had a good time navigating this level.

I did find a bug with your respawn code that sometimes it can place you in a wall–but not too often.

However, and I don’t know whether this was a design choice or a consequence or playing it online with Unity, but the elephant in the room problem was the horrible non-analog look. That is moving the mouse left and right wouldn’t rotate the view except at obscenely large increments.

And I understand you’re probably not going to flesh this out further, but some sort of impetus or goal to keep going, like, I don’t know, text on the floors, would help a lot.

@Chris: I’d recommend giving Unity a try, at least – I’m enjoying it quite a lot! There’s still a lot of basic stuff I don’t know how to do with it yet, but it’s by far the best 3D game making tool I’ve ever used. (I did look into doing some basic 3D stuff in flash using papervision last year, but I wasn’t really able to get very far with it. Same with OpenGL.)

Flash is still my first choice for anything in 2D, though. (Apparently it is possible to do 2D stuff in Unity, but it doesn’t seem to be worth the hassle.)

I hate Unity Web Player on Google Chrome.
Back to the game; it breaks almost every rule in the game design book, and yet it’s compelling enough that I actually got vertigo at one point (specifically, climbing a floating staircase with massive gaps in it right over a crater that I’d been crawling around in minutes earlier). Wow.

(There’s something I really love about these angular single colour polygon environments)

Berbank on
May 21st, 2010

Very stylish. Lovely work. Hope to see you next Tuesday.

Boss on
May 22nd, 2010

Very cool. The mouse sensitivity is really high though, it’s not a problem when you get used to it, but I think most 3D game mouse users are used to making big movements with their right hand. Does unity support control for that?

My sidebar/game categorisation system is a little arbitrary, but after a few day’s distance from this project I really feel quite happy with it. I think I’m going to “upgrade” it to a “minor game” 🙂

Nathanel on
June 4th, 2010

This game is excellent.

Although I got stuck near the beginning, mostly because of disorientation, I find this game rather easy. And it struck me, that one way of measuring game’s quality is to check proper balance of ‘freshness’ (for lack of a better word) and difficulty. This freshness is some exotic game mechanic, or very strange concept, or artistic vision, generally, something that first makes us curious and draws us to the game, but also what repels us from playing it longer. Difficulty may make us angry at the beginning, but also stimulates and moderates our progress, giving us the satisfaction of beating the difficulty. Terry you hit the ideal spot of equilibrium between ‘freshness’ and difficulty. Again. 🙂

I find it annoying that there is no ‘invert mouse’ option anywhere in Unity 3d games, but oh well.

rockist on
June 20th, 2010

Sweet jesus that left me anxious

mhm on
June 23rd, 2010

i have a qustion, whats the point of the game, just explore?

Art on
August 7th, 2010

When I play most of the games I get so addicted to the music that by the time i reach the end it’s hard to turn it off

Sorry about that, the respawning is totally broken, sadly. The problem is really simple too; I used ints instead of doubles, so it kinda snaps to a grid when it respawns, which is sometimes inside a wall.

Miquéias on
September 11th, 2010

What a nice game!
The much red made me feel dizzy, and see how my life is colorful!

Chemical.Rascal on
October 21st, 2010

A very interesting little thing you’ve done here, Terry. It kind of occurred to me as I was playing through that it seemed to be a bit of a commentary on how arbitrary, as gamers, our rules regarding thinking about games are – for example, what we can walk on, what we know is a wall, what we know is open space. Kinda made me realise that, indeed, so are the rules of society, in a way.

Very nice.

AceKid on
November 4th, 2010

Fascinating. In a game so graphically minimal, every detail of the level’s design has to count. I especially enjoyed small quirks, like the staircase with smaller and smaller stairs. The “end” was fun too. Very space-like in it’s otherworldly atmosphere, I felt very alone in my exploration, which left me feeling a touch sad. A very simple game, but one with an nebulous meaning, which makes it react to the player emotionally. *thumbs up*

CactusPants on
December 14th, 2010

Great game! I don’t think I could contribute anything that hasn’t already been said though.

Small minor issue though, with the respawn code it seems to be triggered when the jump button is pressed, for example: when I reached the top I jumped down to a lower level and while still holding the jump button I jumped in circles for a little while then jumped off the edge, I then respawned back on top of the level rather than where I jumped off. The jump sound also doesn’t trigger with each jump.

I don’t know if that is intentional or a known bug, but if you didn’t know, you know now!

But aside from that, awesome game! It’s not really that common to find FPS type games dedicated to platforming.

Alex A on
January 7th, 2011

Really interesting ending. Someone on Kongregate said they should open a ‘philosophy’ genre for their games, and yours would be in it.

This whole game is a strangely disconcerting experience.

(Question: why does the ‘input’ section before you start have various bits saying ‘Fire’? Are there any weapons?)

[…] It’s kinda cool to see this finished, because I’ve had it hanging around in one form or another since last summer. Originally it was a KOTM game about an assassin who spent all his money on designer furniture, and it was called “Killing Spree”. (It was the game about interior decorating I was referring to here) […]

radiosoap on
June 19th, 2015

its rather a good game , i just dont know the point.

i reached to the end and i got a 3d map of the place. what should i do?